ShareReduced Phishing Incidents by 40% for one of India’s premier fintech organisations by deploying Airtel Secure Workforce solutions
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April 20, 2026 -
3 min read
Phishing had become a weekly problem. Not a theoretical risk, not a compliance checkbox an actual operational headache that kept coming back.
The company in question is one of India’s more established financial services players. Mutual funds, insurance, fixed deposits, retirement planning, tax-saving products served across 250+ branches, with a workforce that’s partly remote, partly in-branch, and mostly accessing systems through whatever combination of devices and connections they happen to have on a given day. That setup works fine until it doesn’t.
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The regulatory picture made things harder. RBI, SEBI, IRDAI, PFRDA, and now the DPDP Act each with its own audit requirements, documentation expectations, and compliance timelines. Managing that across hundreds of locations, with a security stack that had grown by accumulation rather than design, wasn’t sustainable. They weren’t failing audits, but they were spending a lot of time on compliance work that should have been automatic.
What was actually broken
The honest answer is: Nothing broke overnight, that rarely does.
Security tools had been added over the years as individual problems surfaced. VPNs for remote access. Separate email protection. Endpoint controls that varied by branch. The result was a setup where nobody had a clean view of what was happening across the network which users were accessing what, which devices were clean, where the weak points were. Branch-level policy enforcement was inconsistent. Monitoring had gaps.
The VPN situation in particular was a problem. Legacy VPN access meant that once someone was in, lateral movement was possible. Admin privileges weren’t tightly controlled. Credential compromise was a realistic scenario, not a remote one.
And email kept being the entry point. Phishing attempts were climbing not dramatically, but steadily and the underlying email configuration (DMARC, SPF, DKIM) wasn’t where it needed to be. Simulations had never really been run. Staff awareness was low on new attack techniques. That combination tends to produce incidents, and it did.
What they deployed
Airtel Secure Workforce replaced the stack not piece by piece, but as a unified platform. The idea was to stop having separate answers to separate problems and get a single view instead.
ZTNA came in for VPN. Identity-based access control meant access decisions were made on verified identity, not just network location. SWG and CASB covered internet and SaaS usage. Endpoint controls standardized device security across branches. DLP ran across web, email, and endpoints to stop sensitive financial data from moving through uncontrolled channels.
On the identity side, Privileged Access Management clamped down on admin rights. Continuous monitoring made unauthorized access attempts visible rather than invisible. These weren’t new concepts for the security team, they just hadn’t had the tooling to enforce them at scale before.
